


trobar clus

by tigrrmilk



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M, how to woo your boyfriend with poetry: a guide, in other words: it's a get-together fic, medieval love lyrics, yusuf is too fancy for moleskine notebooks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:09:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27624515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: “I’m not always sure I understand love lyrics,” Nicolò says, when Yusuf is done, and has drawn closer to the fire, and Nicolò. Yusuf looks up at the night sky, and he sees so many stars, like moth-holes in an old tunic held up to the light. And he sees clouds passing in front of the moon. And he thinks of birdsong.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 24
Kudos: 199





	trobar clus

“So, Joe,” Nile says, stretching on the sofa and trying not to yawn. She’s got to try and keep awake until 9pm in this timezone, at least, or tomorrow is going to be hell. “What’s in the Moleskine? I see you scribbling away in there. Share your secrets.”

“It is _not_ a Moleskine,” Joe says, doing a good job of looking gravely affronted.

“He buys sketchbooks from an artisan in Genova,” Nicky says, not looking up from his book. Nile has a suspicion that he’s reading his favourite Georgette Heyer again. It’s well-thumbed; the back cover is half torn off, fixed back on with duct-tape. “Handmade.”

“Of course you do,” Nile says. Joe closes the notebook as she pantomimes a look over his shoulder. “You like to write? Keep a diary? Draw?”

“Yes,” Joe says. He grins at her, and is quiet for so long she thinks that’s all he’s going to say. But then he rubs his chin and adds, “When you’ve lived a few hundred years, you’ll see just how many different pastimes you start to pick up.”

—-

When they first travel together, neither carries a musical instrument other than his voice, feet and hands. Nicolò has the stronger singing voice, but Yusuf knows a wider variety of songs, from the many different cities and towns he has visited in his still reasonably young 33 years. Or it’s probably more like 34, 35, 36, now. It’s hard to keep track when the normal rhythms of life have become so untethered, they scatter away like sand in a heavy wind.

Some of the songs Yusuf knows come with dances. “Why don’t you dance while I sing?” Nicolò protests.

“No, no, it must be both,” Yusuf says. “Otherwise you are a great coward and the other sailors will toss you out to sea.” He repeats the challenge learned from nights spent with sailors, picking up curses and phrases in the trading tongue -- which he was already well-versed in, but not perhaps to this degree of beautiful vulgarity. And then he grins at Nicolò, and waits for him to give in.

He has so much time to wait, if Nicolò will let him.

They’ve made camp in a rocky patch of desert, a long walk from the nearest river. Yusuf knows that making music tonight is more trouble than it’s worth. But Yusuf always wants the trouble, when it feels this good.

And so, Nicolò tries the dance steps again, and he is treated to Yusuf’s singing voice, husky and warm for all that it’s surprisingly quiet. It’s like his love of song and poetry is a private thing that he is sharing.

It’s no such thing, of course; if they make camp near others on the road then Yusuf will sing and dance with them with no smaller generosity, the same eagerness in his lungs and feet. Still; on the nights when it’s just them, Nicolò enjoys feeling that some of the poetry _is_ for him, after all.

It is poetry of all the world, yes. And for him and Yusuf alone.

\---

They are sitting by a campfire, another similar night, alone except for each other, and Yusuf is singing one of his favourite lyrics. Later on, when they recall the conversation, neither will be sure where exactly they were, or when.

This is often the case for them, as the years pass and stretch out, and go on stretching beyond the horizon. Everything is part of one very long conversation they’d been having since that first day they met outside the walls of Jerusalem. Yusuf is throaty, a slight rasp; they’re low on water out here, and anyone sensible would perhaps save his breath.

But Yusuf can’t die of thirst for water. And it’s one of those nights when he feels overtaken by longings he can’t name -- deeper, somehow, than thirst or hunger -- except through song.

> _O, my heart,  
> _ _you who desire good loving!_  
>  _My little lamb is leaving.  
> _ _And you, my heart, you  
> _ _will not stop loving him!_

“I’m not always sure I understand love lyrics,” Nicolò says, when Yusuf is done, and has drawn closer to the fire, and Nicolò. Yusuf looks up at the night sky, and he sees so many stars, like moth-holes in an old tunic held up to the light. And he sees clouds passing in front of the moon. And he thinks of birdsong.

He thinks of his mother, and women in the city streets, and a song they passed around, freely, about a gazelle in the mountains.

And he looks at Nicolò and he thinks about that song; about the first time he saw a gazelle, near dawn on the outskirts of Tunis. The way it chewed on a spring flower, so delicate and powerful, and darted away as it sensed his approach. Like it had a second sight; like it could feel him in the air before it could see or hear him move.

“What’s there to understand?” Yusuf says, and he looks away again, into the loose threads of the fire, burning down with the night.

\---

That same night, Nicolò tries to explain again. “It’s not that I don’t know the words,” he says. Yusuf nods, although he expects that his companion only knows a handful of the words, as Yusuf isn’t sure about all of them himself, and has likely changed a few more in his own performance. His memory is not perfect, and it has been a long time since his last trading visit to al-Andalus.

“You know, when I have heard this lyric sung in -- Seville, and once I think in Córdoba, it was sung by women. They are known for their use of the vulgar tongue, yes? I thought, every time, I have never heard anything so beautiful. I did not know all of the words, not every time. But it was one of the joys of my life, travelling as much as I did then.”

Nicolò smiles and prods the fire, which is starting to dim. “Yes, it sounded like it was a song created for women’s voices. But that’s not my meaning, quite.”

Yusuf sits patiently while Nicolò thinks through what he is trying to say. He can see the thoughts pass across his face, like shadows on a busy street. When they first knew each other as allies, instead of enemies, Yusuf had thought Nicolò’s manner was distant, his face impossible to read. But the more time they spend together, the more he can’t understand this long-ago thought, this impression. Everything is in the way he moves his lips, his jaw, even without making a sound.

“What I mean is,” Nicolò says, finally. He is very careful with the words, in their own, somehow private, expanded version of the trading tongue that is neither vulgar Latin or Arabic.

“This song is beautiful, and you sing it beautifully. I feel it here, you know I do.” He clasps a hand against his breast, and ducks his head, so Yusuf’s view of him is briefly overcome by the low red sparks of the dying fire, sputtering into the air. “But I don’t know why. I can feel so much sadness in these love songs -- the ones you sing, are they all so sad? Why do they all have to be like this?”

Ah. Yusuf had been prepared to try and impart vocabulary, to widen his friend’s knowledge of the vulgar tongues of Iberia. But not, maybe, for this. Not tonight.

“They are not all like this, perhaps,” Yusuf says, and sighs. “I do think they are often the most beautiful. Songs that talk about what is lost, or about to be.”

“You’re not the only one who thinks so, I expect,” Nicolò says, and Yusuf feels like he’s suddenly the one who needs an interpreter, some help understanding what this means, what’s being said to him. His head feels thick with sleep and the scent of smoke in the wind.

“Perhaps soon we will visit a bigger city,” Nicolò says, when Yusuf doesn’t answer him. “A woman singing on every street corner, with a new voice and dance for you to admire. But maybe some of these older songs, too.”

Yusuf knows they are not that far from a city, in fact. Another six days by foot should see them able to barter for fresh fruit, cheese, and maybe some nights in a bed, as they work out what to do next. He opens his mouth to say as much, but then he closes it again, because they both know this already. None of this is new information.

They prepare to sleep, but Nicolò is not finished with the conversation, not for tonight, and Yusuf is feeling indulgent, warm, happy to let him talk.

Nicolò rolls onto one side to look at him, and there is a slight twist in his mouth, maybe sympathy. Maybe something else. “I love the songs you share with me,” he says, slowly, like he’s revealing a secret. “But I worry that they are so unhappy. Maybe when we find this city, you can find a woman who will teach you happier songs.”

Yusuf, lying on his back, one hand beneath his head, closes his eyes. This is, of course, the opposite of what he wants. When he opens his eyes again and looks over at Nicolò, he has returned to his previous position, and he is not looking back at Yusuf at all.

“Nicolò,” Yusuf says, his voice dry as ashes. When he finally looks over again, his eyes are drawn, and dark in the gloom. Yusuf, who can read him in the darkness as well as sunlight, knows that he is tense and unhappy. How did he miss this, before? “I’m not interested in meeting any women. Not -- not in the way you’re thinking.”

Nicolò widens his eyes and tries a joke. “You already know too many songs?”

Yusuf scoffs. “No such thing, never, in a thousand years.” He pauses then, sombre with the brief flash in front of his eyes of that idea -- a thousand years alive, gathering songs. With Nicolò by his side.

“I don’t sing because I’m thinking about women,” Yusuf confesses. “Have you listened -- have I told you -- they are almost all addressed to men. A man, really.”

Nicolò is staring at his face, very intently. He has rolled onto his side again, and is suddenly very close.

“At least,” Yusuf says. “When I sing them... I am only thinking of you. You must know this. I was sure you knew this.”

Nicolò shakes his head, and runs a hand along the side of Yusuf’s face. “You are so beautiful,” he says, in response. “I thought for sure you were singing for someone you had parted from. All of these songs are about being parted from someone, and I am right here.”

“You were too far away,” Yusuf says, and he finally laughs and kisses him, fingers tangling in Nicolò’s hair. Nicolò yelps into his mouth and slides his hands up Yusuf’s back, and Yusuf is shivering at the touch, and it feels so good, exposed as they are, in the middle of nowhere -- with just the night birds and the dozy crickets, every one singing their heart out to keep them company.

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on tumblr at [alwaysalreadyangry](https://alwaysalreadyangry.tumblr.com/) \- come and say hi!
> 
> i am emphatically not a scholar of this period of history or literary history, and all errors are firmly my own. let me know if you spot anything and i'll do what i can to fix it.
> 
> the love lyric that Yusuf sings is a kharja, translated by James DenBoer, and available in his invaluable book, String of Pearls, which contains translations of sixty four "romance" kharjas from Arabic and Hebrew muwashshaḥāt. the kharja i have chosen is from a muwashshaḥa by Abū Muḥammad ibn ‘Īsà (also known as Ibn al-Labbāna). the version that we have now is corrupted, and there are two distinct versions. the version i have chosen is by Sola-Solé. it is the 10th kharja in his book.
> 
> the best (relatively) quick definition of the kharja i can find is this, taken from the [online encyclopaedia of medieval literature](https://medieval_literature.enacademic.com/351/kharja):
>
>> The term kharja derives from the Arabic word meaning “exit.” A kharja was the end of a longer poem (the muwashshah) that was made up of several sections, or strophes, and was fashionable in Mozarabic Spain. While the muwashshah itself was written in classical Arabic and later imitated in Hebrew, the kharja (a final strophe, usually of three or four lines) was written in a spoken, vernacular dialect— either colloquial Arabic, Hebrew, or a Romance language, or even a mixture of these languages. Many of the kharjas seem to have been composed before the poems of which they are part, and were perhaps in oral circulation. The kharja was generally a love song from the point of view of a lower-class woman longing for her absent lover. The kharjas that survive are thus the earliest extant love poems in any Romance vernacular, dating at least as far back as the early 10th century. Often they express the kind of idealization of romantic love that becomes common in the tradition of fin amors or COURTLY LOVE that arose in neighboring Provençe at the end of the 11th century and spread throughout Europe.  
> Some of the imagery of the kharjas is also reminiscent of the Provençal TROUBADOURS. The motif of love causing the lover physical pain, for example, is present, along with the assertion that only the beloved can cure the speaker’s suffering: “my eyes languish, ah God,/ah they hurt me so!” (Dronke 1968, I, 29) says one kharja, and another laments “My beloved languishes with love of me./Who is there to cure him?/By my lover’s soul, what thirst for my coming!” (Dronke 1968, I, 31).


End file.
